Population Growth and Unemployment in Nigeria (1990-2024)

Nigeria's population has more than doubled since 1990, while its unemployment rate has fluctuated sharply rather than following a steady trend, raising the question of whether population growth is a significant driver of unemployment. This study examines the trend, long-run and short-run relationship, and direction of causality between population growth and unemployment in Nigeria over the period 1990–2024, controlling for real GDP growth, inflation and urbanization. Annual data were sourced from the World Bank World Development Indicators and analysed using the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) bounds testing approach to cointegration, alongside the Pairwise Granger Causality Test. Unit root tests showed that unemployment, population growth, inflation and urbanization were integrated of order one, while real GDP growth was stationary at level, satisfying the pre-condition for ARDL estimation. The bounds test indicated a long-run relationship among the variables at the 10% level, reinforced by a negative and highly significant error correction term (−0.468), implying that about 47% of short-run disequilibrium is corrected within a year. Contrary to the Malthusian expectation, population growth had a negative and statistically insignificant long-run effect on unemployment, whereas real GDP growth had a negative and significant effect, consistent with Okun's Law. However, the Granger causality test revealed a statistically significant, unidirectional causal relationship running from population growth to unemployment. The study concludes that population growth does not exert an immediate, proportional effect on unemployment but is nonetheless a genuine, lagged causal driver of it, and recommends that employment-intensive growth policies be pursued alongside human-capital investment targeted at Nigeria's expanding labour force.